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All the Real Girls purports to be a fresh indie take on the teen-romance flick, but other than some truly original cinematography, all it offers are the same old Hollywood clichés.

Critic Peter Rainer picks the best films of 2002.

Filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe followed iconoclastic director Terry Gilliam to Spain hoping to capture the making of a classic. What they got was so much better.

Unlike Holocaust films that dwell on the horrific spectacle, Frederick Wiseman's portrait of a doomed mother dictating final words to her son is shattering in its simplicity.

The violence in City of God, about the crime-infested slums outside Rio de Janeiro, piles on numbingly; Adolf Hitler's secretary reflects on an unexamined life.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind takes the memoirs of Chuck Barris, the game-show guru who claims to have also been a CIA hit man, at face value.

Drawing on his own experiences during the Holocaust, Roman Polanski creates a searingly haunted tale in his restrained adaptation of The Pianist, a memoir of music and survival.

In Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese creates a nineteenth-century Gotham that is stunningly unfamiliar, but the same can't be said of his characters. Catch Me If You Can is brisk fun.

In About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson plays a smaller-than-life-size man who tries to redeem his empty existence. But the effect is more like midwestern mockery than social satire.

'Adaptation', the new Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman collaboration, picks apart the myth that nothing good ever domes out of Hollywood these days.